On Monday evening, as the Western world slumbered and the Eastern one went about its business, a 20th century icon passed away. Margaret Thatcher, the English grocer’s daughter who went on to become the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister and the longest-serving one of the 20th century, died at age 87.
The passing of the Baroness Thatcher, like the era she represented, occurred quietly but not unexpectedly – she had, after all, been quite elderly, infirm and in poor health for some time. Today, while the chattering classes talk unceasingly about her life and legacy, many will focus on the woman and her time in office, 1979 – 1990, but a better perspective on Thatcher’s life might be to contextualize it within the world she lived.
The makings of a Baroness
Born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire in east-central England, the world she entered was so profoundly different from ours today that it is difficult to imagine. Seven years before her birth, Europe had just finished devastating itself in the Great War – which is what the First World War was called before there was a second – and Britain, that titan of the 19th century, dominated lands that spanned the globe. It was, quite literally, the empire upon which the sun never set.
For Thatcher’s time of birth was when the tiny U.K., now known mostly as America’s most trusted sidekick, was a superpower. India was still under the yoke of the British Raj, the Middle East was London’s plaything, Africa was run by European bureaucrats, and China, the colossus of today’s 21st-century economy, was split apart into warring factions that all scrambled to seize a piece of Imperial China’s decaying corpse.
The world was, despite the self-inflicted wounds of the First World War, the West’s oyster. Only Japan, which had modernized along Western lines, stood amongst the ranks of great powers in terms of economic and military potential. As for the rest of the non-Western world, from Shanghai to Dakar, from Cape Town to Katmandu, it was London, Paris or some other European capital that called the shots.
Within Britain itself, someone traveling back in time from the death of Lady Thatcher to the day of her birth would also find immense differences. Mass democracy, for instance, was new in Britain as working-class men of no property – the vast majority of those whom had fought and died for King and Country in Britain’s armies on the Western Front – had only gained the right to vote in parliamentary elections at the conclusion of the war. Women, too, had gained the right to vote, but only a fraction of them – full suffrage for British women, including Margaret Thatcher, would come three years after her birth, in 1928.
A year later, the Great Depression, sparked by a financial crisis on an unregulated Wall Street – funny how that seems to keep happening – wrought untold misery on millions as the global economy fell apart under the strain of mass unemployment. As a result of this catastrophe, new economic ideas and political forces would rise up in Britain and elsewhere to force governments to deal with the crisis. But, before that, another world war would drive Britain to its knees and force the young Ms. Thatcher to dodge German bombs during the Blitz.
This was because democracy in Weimar Germany had, by the early 1930s, turned ugly. Voices on the extreme left and the extreme right, previously muffled by the relative prosperity of the post-war 1920s, drowned out moderates seeking to weather the economic storm via the implementation of tempered, even-handed reforms. Democracy died as fascism and Hitler peddled grandiose ideas of racial superiority and national aggrandizement to populations that had given up hope that democratic politics could solve their problems.
The war that followed swept across all of Europe and Asia, killing 60 million people in the process, and wrecked forever Europe’s claim to political primacy and cultural superiority. When the war was over in 1945, Margaret Thatcher, at the age of 20, had finally come of age in a world where the foundations of the conservative, small-town way of life she grew up in had been permanently swept away.
Restoring that order, first in Britain and then internationally, would become Margaret Thatcher’s life’s work, and she set about doing so determinedly and methodically. Like a latter-day Joan of Arc, Thatcher crusaded unendingly on a conservative platform that promised a return to the golden era that existed, in her mind’s eye, before Depression and War demolished the old Britain of global empire, middle-class values, and laissez faire capitalism. Along the way, she became the most famed and controversial figure in British politics since Winston Churchill.
Birth of a new Britain
In some respects, her quest to stand athwart history, yelling “stop” was successful. Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister saw a massive rollback of the British state in every corner of society – from the selling off of government-owned coal mines and housing developments to a deregulation of trade and industry that greatly benefited London financial houses, if not the average worker. British unions, though not broken, were soundly defeated and their grip on the Labour Party weakened – allowing Tony Blair and his soft, center-left “New Labour” to emerge in the late 1990s after 18 years of conservative rule. Like Ronald Reagan in America, she created a ruling coalition that shifted her country’s political orientation in a decidedly more conservative direction for a generation.
British power overseas, too, was reasserted. When the Falklands Islands were invaded and occupied by Argentina, she rallied the nation and sent in the Royal Navy – instigating the last wholly European war against a major non-European country in modern history. Furthermore, with her good friend Reagan at her side, she tirelessly confronted the Soviet Union and worked to strengthen the North Atlantic alliance wherever and whenever she could. She also helped end the Cold War, not just fight it, when she signaled to anti-communist hawks, both in Europe and America, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was “a man we could do business with.”
Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to turn back the clock on social changes at home and geopolitical shifts abroad, however, can now be seen as something far less than a total triumph. In hindsight, she at best changed the exact spot where late-20th century Britain ended up making its landing, but did little to change the overall downward trajectory from global empire to just a small, though important, part of Europe. Thatcher freed British capitalism, to be sure, but did so merely to see its capitalists flee abroad – leading to her country’s deindustrialization and a sustained rise in U.K. economic inequality in the new globalized economy her policies helped create.
Her efforts to re-establish British military power also proved chimerical. The Falklands may have been a faded replay of Britain’s finest hour, but it reinforced the notion that the United Kingdom could no longer commit major military forces outside of Europe for prolonged periods of time without assistance from the United States. When next the British military deployed outside Europe en masse – against Iraq in 1991 – it was in lockstep with Washington. Thatcher may also have put her seal of approval on Gorbachev, but the deal that ended the Cold War was inked by Washington – not London. Today, Britain’s geopolitical decline is even more evident as contemporary Britain is now arguably less important than India – her former colonial ward – on the world’s geopolitical chessboard.
As went Britain, so has gone most of the rest of the Western world. Economic and military power is now as widely dispersed geographically as they have been in two centuries – a trend that looks to continue for some time to come. The United States is still on top, but is steadily losing ground while Europe, nominally unified in a loose confederation, remains bogged down in its own political and economic navel-gazing. Europe, like Britain, has diminished to the point of military irrelevance as peace has broken out across it. European countries are still rich, but wealth conveys only so much influence and, as the rest of the world grows prosperous, that influence, too, will diminish.
The Eurocentric world Thatcher was born into, like the Iron Lady herself, has passed into history and the Western-oriented world order it bequeathed, barely kept afloat by Washington, is sure to follow. Beijing, not Britain, is where analysts read tea leaves now, and it is Central Asia, not Central Europe, where states jockey for place and position. Globalization has invigorated Shanghai and Bangalore, not Southampton and Birmingham, and the world’s fate, for the first time in centuries, is now hinging upon what peoples to the south and east decide to do, not the north and west.
Margaret Thatcher’s death, then, is a simple way in which to mark the end of the last half-millennia or so of human history. At one end of it the West is waxing. At the other, despite her superhuman efforts, it is waning. Powerful social forces, both bubbling up from below and being imposed from above, has caused this to happen, and no single individual – not even the Iron Lady at her most stubborn – can stop it. Thatcher tried, however, and the world is a different place, both for better and for worse, because of it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.